A Disease in the Public Mind Read online

  While his sons died, Brown made speeches to his hostages. “Gentlemen,” he said, “if you knew of my past history, you would not blame me for being here. I went to Kansas a peaceable man and the proslavery people hunted me down like a wolf.” This was neither the first nor the last of John Brown’s many lies.

  One of the hostages asked Brown if he was aware that he had committed treason by attacking a federal arsenal. “Certainly,” Brown said.

  Two of the raiders, a brother of the dead Thompson and a young man named Anderson from Indiana, exclaimed in shock at Brown’s admission. They announced that they would fight no more. They had joined Brown to free slaves, not commit treason. It was a sad glimpse of the simplicity of Brown’s followers.13

  • • •

  Meanwhile, Colonel Lee was conferring with the leaders of the militia. The colonel was inclined to storm the firehouse immediately. The locals demurred. A shootout in the dark seemed likely to prove fatal to some of the hostages. Lee agreed to wait until dawn.

  Soon after daybreak, Lee ordered Marine Lieutenant Israel Green to pick twelve good men and storm the place, relying on the bayonet to lower the chances of killing any of the hostages. The signal to attack would come from Lieutenant Stuart, who was ordered to give Brown one more chance to surrender peacefully.

  Stuart approached the firehouse door carrying a flag of truce; Brown opened it a cautious crack and pointed a rifle at the lieutenant’s head. In spite of Brown’s beard, Stuart recognized him as “Old Brown of Osawatomie,” the Kansas guerilla. Stuart had served in a regiment of federal cavalry sent to pacify Kansas during the confused fighting between proslavery and antislavery settlers. Once, the cavalrymen had captured Brown, but they had lacked a warrant to arrest him and had let him go.

  Stuart did his utmost to persuade Brown to surrender, pointing out that his situation was hopeless. He was outnumbered a hundred to one. When Brown tried to negotiate with him, Stuart tried in vain to make it clear that he had no power to change Colonel Lee’s terms. Somewhere behind Brown a deep voice called, “Never mind us, fire!” It was Colonel Lewis Washington. Outside, Colonel Lee recognized his voice. “That old revolutionary blood does tell,” he remarked to no one in particular.14

  Lieutenant Stuart stepped away from the door and waved his hat—the signal for the marines to attack. While two thousand spectators cheered, three marines with sledgehammers assailed the thick oak door. It remained amazingly intact. Finally, other marines seized a heavy ladder and used it as a battering ram. The door splintered and a chunk fell inward. The marines, led by Lieutenant Green, clambered through the gap. Rifles barked, bullets whined. One marine was killed instantly; another went down wounded. These casualties disinclined the rest of the marines to show anyone much mercy. Young Thompson and Anderson, who had been so shocked to learn they had committed treason, died from multiple bayonet thrusts before they could explain that they had quit fighting.

  Lieutenant Green headed for John Brown, who was trying to reload his rifle. Green thrust his small dress sword into Brown’s midriff—and was dismayed to see it bend almost double when it collided with the buckle on the strap of George Washington’s sword. The infuriated Green beat Brown over the head with the hilt of the dress sword, knocking him unconscious.

  In less than sixty seconds the fight was over, the hostages freed. Only one man surrendered successfully—Edward Coppoc, the killer of Mayor Beckham. One of Brown’s black volunteers, Shields Green, who was a fugitive slave from South Carolina, tried to mingle with the captured Harpers Ferry slaves, but they showed no desire to protect him. He was seized by rough hands and made a prisoner.15

  • • •

  On the other side of the Potomac, Maryland militiamen raced to the schoolhouse, which Owen Brown and his men had invaded with their guns and pikes, sending the teacher and panicked children fleeing into the countryside. By the time the militiamen arrived, this remnant of Brown’s insurrectionary army had fled, leaving the weapons behind. The hundreds of pikes were an especially chilling sight to the militiamen. They shuddered at the havoc these weapons might have wrought in the hands of rebelling slaves.

  Back in the firehouse, Brown was bleeding profusely from wounds to the head. They were all superficial; while they were being dressed, he regained consciousness. Marines carried him into the armory paymaster’s office, where he lay on a pallet while dozens of curious Ferry townsfolk ogled him.

  In the afternoon Virginia’s governor, Henry A. Wise, and several other politicians, including Senator James M. Mason of Virginia and Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, arrived to question him. Reporters mingled with these visitors. Colonel Lee asked Brown if he wished the newsmen excluded. Brown said he wanted them to stay. He was eager to “make himself and his motives clearly understood.”

  Brown swiftly demonstrated his goal was obfuscation, not clarity. He did his utmost to conceal the identity of his northern backers. He also tried to muddle the scope of his insurrection. He told Senator Mason, “We came to free the slaves, and only that.”

  Congressman Vallandigham asked him if he had been hoping for a general rising of the slaves. “No sir,” Brown lied. “I expected to gather them up from time to time, and set them free.”

  A reporter closed the interview by asking Brown if he had anything further to say. Brown paused for a moment, then replied: “I have nothing to say, only that I claim to be carrying out a measure I believe perfectly justifiable, and not to act the part of an incendiary or ruffian, but to aid those suffering great wrong. I wish to say, furthermore, that you had better—all of you people of the South—prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question . . . sooner than you are prepared for it. You may dispose of me very easily—I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled—this Negro question, I mean, the end of that is not yet.”

  While Brown was talking, Lieutenant Stuart led a marine detachment to the Kennedy Farm, where they seized Brown’s maps of the South and his correspondence with his wealthy northern backers—proof of the huge slave insurrection he hoped to create and lead. But finding this evidence and convincing the American people that John Brown was ready to commit mass murder in pursuit of his blood-drenched dream turned out to be two very different things.16

  CHAPTER 1

  Slavery Comes to America

  Long before the first slaves arrived in the English colony of Virginia in 1619, slavery was a thriving institution in the New World. Hundreds of thousands of black men and women were already toiling on the farms and plantations and in the mines of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in Mexico and South America and on the offshore islands we call the West Indies.

  Few people criticized or objected to slavery; it was one of the world’s oldest social institutions, with roots in ancient Babylon, Greece, and Rome. Greece, the proud forerunner of rule by democracy, found no contradiction in insisting that slavery was essential to a thriving republic. The Roman republic and later the empire had tens of thousands of slaves within its borders.

  The Hebrew Bible described Abraham and other early leaders of the Jews as slave owners. In the book of Leviticus, Jehovah told Moses that Jews were forbidden to enslave their brethren, but they were free to buy slaves “from nations around you.” Another biblical passage had a huge influence on associating slavery with black people: Noah’s curse on his son Ham for the sin of seeing his father naked while he was sleeping. (This seemingly harmless act may be a metaphor for a sexual assault.) Noah condemned Ham’s descendants to be “the lowest of slaves.” Among the offspring of Ham was Kush, the supposed progenitor of the blacks who populated Africa.1

  The later religion of Islam forbade Muslims from enslaving fellow Muslims. But there was no barrier to enslaving “infidels.” More than a million Christians, captured in wars and conquests, suffered this fate. The Muslims also transported thousands of Africans from nations and tribes that lived south of the Sahara Desert for heavy labor in their Mediterranean empire. Over the centuries
, these luckless people acquired a derogatory reputation. One Muslim writer described them as “the least intelligent and least discerning of mankind.”2

  This early racism was communicated to white Christians in Spain and Portugal, where there was a Muslim presence for several centuries. Black slaves were numerous in both countries. The Roman Catholic Church found little or no fault with slavery. In 1488, King Ferdinand of Spain gave Pope Innocent VIII a hundred slaves as a gift. The prelate distributed them to various cardinals and Roman nobles. This tolerance was by no means limited to Spain, Portugal, and Italy. The great English humanist Thomas More thought slavery was the proper condition for those convicted of crimes, and he included it in his vision of the perfect republic, Utopia.3

  • • •

  By the early 1600s, in the capital cities of Lima and Mexico City, half the population was enslaved Africans. France also participated in the imperial game, founding colonies in the West Indies and in what is now modern Louisiana that were heavily dependent on enslaved Africans. When Great Britain entered the competition for colonies, her powerful fleet soon won domination of the world’s seas. The British too turned to Africa, where a veritable industry had developed, dedicated to capturing slaves in the interior and selling them on the seacoast. Over the centuries, the price per slave rose over 1,000 percent.

  Between 1501 and the 1880s, when the last two South American states, Brazil and Cuba, abolished slavery, an estimated 12.5 million black men and women were purchased in Africa and resold in America. By far the greatest percentage of this staggering number labored to produce the New World’s most profitable product: sugar—a rare luxury in Europe before Columbus. To grow and harvest it required unremitting, exhausting toil in a climate that was thick with diseases such as malaria and yellow fever.4

  For almost four centuries, Brazil and the West Indies consumed (the word is chosen deliberately) 89 percent of all the slaves shipped to the New World. The Spanish mainland colonies imported only 4.4 percent. About 5.6 percent of this involuntary migration came to Britain’s North American colonies.

  These colonies were soon heavily involved in the slave-based sugar empire. Tons of molasses from the West Indies travelled to New England, where it was used in hundreds of distilleries to make rum. The same ships sold much-needed grain and other farm products to the overpopulated islands. Some colonies, such as Rhode Island and Massachusetts, participated in transporting slaves from Africa. By 1750, there were a half million slaves in the American colonies. Most of these bondsmen were in the South, but some northern colonies had substantial numbers.

  At least 14 percent of New York’s population was slaves; for New Jersey the figure was 12 percent, and for Massachusetts 8 percent. Like the rest of the New World’s settlers, few Americans criticized the institution. “The great majority,” John Jay of New York wrote in 1788, accepted slavery as a matter of course. “Very few . . . even doubted the propriety and rectitude of it.”

  This attitude was reinforced by the knowledge that slavery was hugely profitable. “The Negroe-trade . . . may justly be termed an inexhaustible fund of wealth and naval power to this nation,” wrote one complacent English economist.5

  • • •

  There were a few exceptions to this unanimity. In 1688, four Germantown, Pennsylvania, Quakers sent a vehement protest against slavery to their local Monthly Meeting. They declared that purchasing a slave was no different from buying stolen goods. The local Meeting forwarded it to Philadelphia’s Quaker elders, who had authority of sorts over all the Quakers in America. The Philadelphia elders deposited it in their files and ignored it. Another century would pass before anyone else heard of it.

  In 1700, Samuel Sewall, a Massachusetts judge who was deeply troubled by his role in the 1692 witch trials, freed a black man named Adam. The slave was able to prove that his master, John Saffin, had promised him freedom if he worked hard for seven years. Saffin reneged on the promise, claiming the slave had often been disobedient and defiant. The ex-master objected to Sewall’s verdict and the judge responded in a pamphlet, The Selling of Joseph, that condemned the injustice of enslaving any human being, black or white. “It is most certain that all men, as they are sons of Adam . . . have an equal right unto liberty and all other outward comforts of life,” Sewall wrote.

  John Saffin responded in turn with a crude poem that made him one of the first Americans to argue that racial inferiority justified slavery.

  THE NEGROES CHARACTER

  Cowardly and cruel are these blacks innate

  Prone to revenge, imp of inveterate hate

  He that exasperates them, soon espies

  Mischief and Murder in their very eyes

  Libidinous, deceitful, false and Rude

  The spume issue of ingratitude

  The premises consider’d, all may tell

  How near good Joseph they are parallel.6

  Four decades passed before another American spoke out against slavery—and made a difference in the way many people perceived it.

  • • •

  John Woolman was a twenty-two-year-old clerk in a dry goods store in Mount Holly, New Jersey. One day in 1742, he looked up from his desk, where he was adding up the day’s receipts, when his employer said, “John, I’ve sold Nancy to this gentleman. Draw up a bill of sale for her.”

  His employer and the man beside him were both Quakers—the same faith into which John Woolman had been born. Quakers believed they should try to live as if every man and woman were a priest, with a direct relationship—and responsibility—to Jesus Christ and his teachings. Reading the Bible and meditating on the sacred words often brought a message from God—“a new light”—into their lives.

  John Woolman got out a fresh sheet of paper and his quill pen. But something seemed to paralyze his arm. He could not write a word. What was happening to him? Why was a voice in his soul telling him that selling Nancy was wrong?

  Nancy was a black slave who worked in his employer’s house. Woolman did not know her well. In 1742, thousands of American Quakers owned slaves. Neither Woolman nor anyone else knew about the Germantown Quakers of 1688.

  Suddenly John Woolman heard himself saying, “I believe slave-keeping to be a practice inconsistent with the Christian religion.”

  Both the buyer and the seller told Woolman this was a “light” that had not yet reached them. Would he please write the bill of sale? With great reluctance, John Woolman completed the document. By evening, Nancy was gone from Mount Holly. For the next few weeks John Woolman remained deeply troubled. In his journal he reproached himself for not asking to be excused from writing the bill of sale “as a thing against my conscience.”7

  Born on a farm in the Rancocas River valley in western New Jersey, John Woolman was a happy child who responded to the beauty of nature and a growing sense of God’s presence in his soul. By the time he began working in Mount Holly, he had decided to devote himself to preaching God’s word as it was revealed to him.

  A few months later, when another Quaker asked Woolman to draw up a bill of sale for a slave, he refused. This man confessed that keeping a slave disturbed his conscience too. The men parted with “good will,” Woolman noted in his journal.8

  Slavery continued to trouble John Woolman. One day a close friend said he was drawn by the Spirit to make a journey to Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas to preach. He asked Woolman to join him. Woolman found the journey very upsetting. In the southern colonies, tens of thousands of slaves toiled on large plantations. New Jersey had only about ten thousand slaves. Most worked on relatively small farms, where the owner usually labored beside them.

  Whenever Woolman and his friend stayed with southerners who “lived in ease on the hard labor of their slaves,” Woolman found it difficult to accept the food and drink he was offered. Again and again he felt compelled to “have conversation with them in private concerning it.” When he revealed his growing conviction that slavery was a sin, many of his hosts politely told him to mind his ow
n business. A few became angry.

  Woolman confided to his journal his fear that slavery was casting “a gloom over the land” with consequences that would be “grievous” to future generations. Most colonists—including most Quakers—continued to ignore him. In 1750, Britain’s Parliament officially sanctioned the slave trade. The city of Liverpool, which was making millions of pounds from the business, commissioned an artist to portray a black slave as part of their official seal.

  John Woolman kept trying to stir consciences. He wrote a pamphlet, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, and a fellow Quaker read it to the Philadelphia Meeting. It was an earnest argument against slavery as an injustice and a violation of the principles of the Christian religion.

  With marriage and children, Woolman’s responsibilities grew. He worked as a tailor, investing his profits in an orchard. But he spent part of every year traveling to preach against slavery. “What shall we do when God riseth up?” he asked at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends.

  In Rhode Island, Woolman discovered that Thomas Hazard, son of one of the richest men in the colony, had become so troubled by the question Woolman was raising that he had freed all his slaves. His father, who owned far more slaves, was outraged and threatened to disinherit him. In 1758, when Woolman again addressed the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the Quakers appointed a committee to begin working to abolish slavery in the colonies.

  The committee decided to visit Newport, Rhode Island, and John Woolman was invited to join them. It was an agonizing experience. Rhode Island’s ships and seamen brought thousands of slaves from Africa each year. The sight of the pens and chains aboard the slave ships made Woolman physically ill. In his journal he told of feeling like the biblical prophet Habakkuk when he saw people do things of which Jehovah disapproved. “My lips quivered . . . and I trembled in myself.”9